Person

Larry Hurtado

Larry W. Hurtado (1943-2019) was an American-born New Testament scholar and historian of early Christianity. He is best known for his work on early Christian devotion to Jesus and for the early high Christology thesis: the claim that the worship of Jesus as divine was not a late Greek-influenced development but an original feature of the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, present within the first two decades after the crucifixion. Hurtado's work is load-bearing for the Christian apologetic case that high Christology is historically primitive rather than a slow doctrinal development.

Biographical sketch

Born December 29, 1943, Kansas City, Missouri.
Education, BA, Seattle Pacific University; MA, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School; PhD, Case Western Reserve University (1973), under Howard Kee.
University of Manitoba (1975-96), Professor of Religion, where he produced One God, One Lord (1988), his first major book on the "binitarian" pattern of early Christian worship.
University of Edinburgh (1996-2011), Professor of New Testament Language, Literature and Theology; Head of the School of Divinity. Produced his magnum opus Lord Jesus Christ (2003) during this period.
Emeritus (2011-19), continued publishing and blogging steadily until his death.
Died November 25, 2019, Edinburgh, Scotland, age 75.

Core thesis: early high Christology as devotional practice

Hurtado's distinctive contribution is methodological. Rather than tracking Christological titles (Son of God, Lord, Logos) and asking when each one was first applied to Jesus, he tracks devotional practices, the things earliest Christians actually did in worship, and asks what those practices presuppose about Jesus' status. The key practices:

Prayer and invocation to and through Jesus, including the Aramaic Maranatha ("Our Lord, come!", 1 Cor 16:22). The fact that this prayer is in Aramaic proves that Aramaic-speaking Palestinian Jews were addressing Jesus as Lord before any Hellenistic (Greek) influence could have shaped things.
Hymns to Christ, the pre-Pauline Christ-hymns (Phil 2:6-11; Col 1:15-20; 1 Cor 8:6) were composed earlier than Paul's letters and already assume divine-status Christology.
Ritual invocation of Jesus' name, baptism "in the name of Jesus" (Acts 2:38), healing and exorcism in Jesus' name, the use of the nomen sacrum abbreviations (sacred-name abbreviations) in the earliest manuscripts.
Inclusion of Christ in the divine identity, the "binitarian" worship pattern, where Jesus receives the kind of devotion that, within Jewish monotheism, belonged exclusively to YHWH. This is the same phenomenon Richard Bauckham calls "including Jesus in the divine identity" and Hurtado calls "the Christ-devotion mutation."

The force of the argument: these practices appear in our earliest evidence (Paul's letters, pre-Pauline creeds, Aramaic liturgical formulas), not in later strata. The "development" model, on which a human Jesus was slowly elevated to divine status through centuries of Greek influence, cannot account for the devotional data from the first two decades.

Major works

One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism (Fortress, 1988; 3rd ed. T&T Clark, 2015), foundational monograph establishing the "binitarian mutation" within Jewish monotheism.
Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003), Hurtado's magnum opus. 700+ pages covering the first two centuries of Christ-devotion, from the earliest Palestinian Jewish communities through the second-century church. The standard academic reference for early high Christology.
How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Eerdmans, 2005), accessible summary of the Lord Jesus Christ thesis for non-specialists.
The Earliest Christian Artifacts: Manuscripts and Christian Origins (Eerdmans, 2006), material-culture evidence (nomina sacra, staurogram, codex preference) as data for earliest Christian self-understanding.
Destroyer of the Gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness in the Roman World (Baylor UP, 2016), early Christianity's distinctive features (exclusivism, book-centeredness, cross-ethnic identity, ethical rigorism) as historically anomalous and demanding explanation.
Why on Earth Did Anyone Become a Christian in the First Three Centuries? (Marquette UP, 2016), the social-cost argument: conversion to Christianity in the first three centuries carried severe social penalties, requiring a cause large enough to outweigh the cost.

Scholarly context

Hurtado's work stands in a cluster with several complementary but distinct scholars:

Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the God of Israel, 2008), agrees on early high Christology but frames it through "divine identity" (functional categories are not enough; Jesus is included in the unique identity of YHWH). Hurtado and Bauckham largely converge but differ on terminology and emphasis.
Martin Hengel (The Son of God, 1976; Between Jesus and Paul, 1983), earlier German scholarship establishing how fast Christology developed. Hurtado builds on Hengel's timeline.
N.T. Wright (The Climax of the Covenant, 1991; Paul and the Faithfulness of God, 2013), agrees on early high Christology within a broader covenant-theology framework; modulates the Two Powers framing.
Alan Segal (Two Powers in Heaven, 1977), a Jewish scholar documenting pre-Christian Jewish binitarianism (the idea, found in some Second Temple Jewish texts, of two figures sharing divine authority). Hurtado draws on Segal's rabbinic evidence. See Two Powers in Heaven.
Daniel Boyarin (Border Lines, 2004), Orthodox Jewish Talmudist arguing that high Christology is native to Second Temple Judaism, not a Christian import. Corroborates Hurtado from the Jewish side.

Counter-positions:

James D.G. Dunn (Christology in the Making, 1980), argues that pre-existence Christology is a later development; the earliest Christology was adoptionist (Jesus was a man adopted by God). Hurtado responds that Dunn focuses on titles while ignoring devotional practices.
Maurice Casey (From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God, 1991), argues high Christology only emerged in Gentile-majority communities. Hurtado counters with the Aramaic Maranatha evidence and the pre-Pauline creedal formulas.
Bart Ehrman (How Jesus Became God, 2014), argues for a gradual elevation model. Hurtado published a response essay; see also the collective volume How God Became Jesus (2014) by Bird, Evans, Gathercole, Hill, and Tilling.

Apologetic significance

Anchors the historical case for the deity of Christ. The early-high-Christology thesis removes the "the councils invented it" objection by showing that divine-status devotion to Jesus pre-dates all ecumenical councils by centuries. See Two Powers in Heaven, Pre-Pauline Creeds, Trinity Invented at Nicaea Objection.
Counters the mythicist trajectory. If the earliest layer of Christianity we can recover already worships Jesus as divine within a strict Jewish-monotheist framework, the "Jesus was just a teacher later turned into a god" narrative has no historical ground to stand on. See Historicity of Jesus.
Strengthens the Christology domain hub. Hurtado's devotional-practice method complements the textual-exegetical approach (Bauckham) and the OT-background approach (Old Testament Witness to the Deity of Christ).
Social-cost argument. Why on Earth Did Anyone Become a Christian? supplies an independent historical argument. The severe social penalties for early conversion require a cause big enough to outweigh the cost. The best candidate is a genuine encounter with the risen Christ.